Welcome to a Special Edition review! I am breaking one of my own rules and writing a review for a movie that I had already seen before (several times). I am doing this because, for the first time, I finally got around to reading the Carl Sagan novel on which it is based. So while this will be a "movie review," it will also be about the book, and their differences.
The movie is a pretty good movie - it is long, but it has decent enough pacing, and it is a relatively grounded sci-fi story, and the actors do a pretty good job what what they need to do, and it's entertaining enough to keep even my sci-fi hater wife awake, when she normally falls asleep halfway through Boring Space Movies. But in my opinion, this is one of the many classic examples of the movie form of a story simply being unable to live up to the printed word.
The story is basically kept intact, as it turns out; most of the same things approximately happen to all the same people. Ellie's personal story of resentment toward her (book-living, movie-deceased) mother isn't in there, but I'm not actually sure it is critical to the themes. Many of the characters are the same, or similar, or amalgamations of a couple of characters at once in order to keep the cast a reasonable size for a movie. But there are a few losses that feel significant to me, and totally change some of what I think was important to the ideas being presented in the original work.
The book is a very philosophical work at heart; and if I had to distill what it is about to a single idea, I would say it is about the human spirit and its capacity for "love" and "wonder" (which are kind of the same thing, to him). The movie touches on this, certainly, and it isn't totally lost, but it is damaged by some choices they made.
For instance, in the book, everything becomes very international - the Message and the Machine are tools by which the human race overcomes some of its petty differences like "nationality" and joins together, leading to a bunch of positive outcomes like multilateral nuclear disarmament, etc. But in the movie, everything is very American. There is one single person selected, rather than five, and it is always an American, and the American government is running everything. To strip the internationalist spirit back down to a nationalism is perhaps understandable from a commercial/business perspective for the movie audience, but I think that actually just makes the decision even worse. You also lose the five different interpretations of the idealistic view of humans that he tries to show through different cultural lenses in the selections of those specific candidates from other cultures (not to mention how undermining it is to have no one with her sharing her experience at the climax).
Another is in some of the characters - Dr. Drumlin, for instance, is an asshole and skeptic of Dr. Arroway's discovery in the book, but he is at heart a scientist and respects her, and becomes very supportive and dives into the project, and eventually even sacrifices himself to save her life. In the movie, he has a tiny little half-apologetic speech, but does nothing to defend her, and is much more self-aggrandizing. His death does not reveal the same character in him, and in general he's a much more pessimistic view than the novel version. Many of other friends from the book with whom she bonds and enjoys her time aren't in the movie at all; they get one single stand-in to represent friendship for all of them, in a movie that is at least partially about not being alone. It would be a much stronger point if she wasn't, in fact, mostly alone aside from a love interest.
Palmer Joss is another one with some significant differences, I think for the worse; he is the Love Interest, but in the book he is much more of a friend and philosophical foil; he represents the "good" side of religion that Carl Sagan wants to convey, the idea of companionship, awe, and wonder, and the search for truth. The movie version says some of the same things, but you are forced to wonder how much of his character is just his personal romantic love for the main character driving his actions, instead. In general, the movie strongly oversimplifies the "religion vs science" narrative into a much more pop culture idea of direct opposition; in fact, Ellie spends a lot of time thinking about her agnosticism, and Palmer Joss is an educated scientist (who is nonetheless religious), and care is taken to show the both the good and bad sides of what religion is capable of. The cinematic version, though, is just a simplistic storyline about how sometimes faith is required even of scientists.
I think the last main thing I want to talk about is how profoundly optimistic Contact is. The movie is optimistic, but the book remarkably so. I have spent a lot of time wondering what "optimistic Western sci-fi of the modern era" would look like. Golden Age science fiction is often extremely optimistic - portraying great futures for humanity, huge advancements in technology that make the future seem like a magical place. But modern science fiction does not do that; it is mostly dystopian, everything a disaster, inequalities magnified, environments destroyed, extinction imminent. When I read the Three Body Problem, I finally found modern sci-fi that was optimistic, but it is very Chinese, and it makes sense; it is a country that is actually improving in some ways (or at least that was the feeling at the time). The US and Western Europe are in many ways very stagnant, and for a lot of people getting worse in some ways. I still think that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice but it sure does not FEEL that way in the moment, and it is reflected in the way we write about the future. Contact is written after the Golden Age, but it is still not quite modern, so it doesn't fill the niche for me, but it is interesting remembering how positive the hopes and dreams are for the future in a work like this. It is easy to imagine what a good future looks like, but very hard to imagine the path there. I wish I could share his awe and joy in imagining a path from when and where he lived to that future.
Score: 7/10
IMDb: Contact
PS: Don't even get me started on Hadden - a character whose motives are explained and defined by his own search for truth through immortality in the book, and who translates on screen as some sort of very creepy Elon Musk-like man (extremely not-a-compliment).
